2026-05-17 · 5 min read

Richland County Government Website Accessibility: Columbia, The COMET, and Fort Jackson Under the DOJ Title II Rule

Richland County is South Carolina's second most populous county, home to approximately 430,000 residents and anchored by Columbia, the state capital. The county's digital accessibility obligations are amplified by several factors that increase the probability of complaints and enforcement action: Fort Jackson, the US Army's largest basic training installation, creates a substantial military-adjacent and veteran population with above-average rates of service-connected disabilities. The University of South Carolina brings a large student population and disability services infrastructure with high assistive technology awareness. And as the seat of state government, Columbia concentrates both municipal and state agency web content within a single metropolitan area.

The DOJ Title II Final Rule published in April 2024 sets a binding compliance deadline of April 26, 2027 for state and local government entities with populations of 50,000 or greater. Richland County, the City of Columbia, and Central Midlands Transit each clear that threshold independently. The clock is running.

Who Is Covered

Richland County Government — population approximately 430,000 — is covered as a Title II entity. All county web content, digital services, and public-facing applications must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027.

City of Columbia — population approximately 135,000 and South Carolina's largest city — is covered independently. City digital services, including permitting portals, business licensing, parks and recreation registration, and utility payment platforms, are all in scope.

Central Midlands Transit (The COMET) is a regional transit authority serving Richland, Lexington, Newberry, and Fairfield counties. Transit authorities are independently covered under Title II regardless of how they relate to their member counties. The COMET's website, trip planning tools, and any mobile applications must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA by the same deadline.

State agencies in Columbia — SCDOT, DHEC, DSS, and others — are covered under separate Title II obligations as state entities. Their web content is out of scope for county or city compliance programs, but local IT leadership frequently fields questions that cross jurisdictional lines. The SC-level overview is at South Carolina government website accessibility.

What Is Covered

The DOJ rule covers all web content and mobile applications that a covered entity makes available to the public or uses to offer programs and services. This includes:

• HTML pages on primary and subdomain sites
• PDFs and other document formats linked from or hosted on covered sites
• Web-based portals, even when operated by a third-party vendor under contract
• Mobile applications published by the entity or on its behalf
• Third-party content embedded in covered pages when the entity controls its selection or configuration

A common misreading is that only the main .gov site is covered. Vendor-hosted portals — payment processors, permit tracking systems, GIS viewers, transit schedule tools — are in scope if the entity directs the public to use them.

Where Richland County Sites Most Commonly Fail

Scanned PDF council agendas and public records. Richland County council agendas, meeting minutes, and supporting documents are frequently published as image-based scans. Scanned PDFs contain no machine-readable text: they fail every screen reader, every search, and every WCAG 2.1 criterion related to text alternatives. This is a systematic failure that applies to years of archived documents, not just new uploads.

Columbia's online permitting and business licensing portals. Permit and licensing portals typically involve complex multi-step forms, dynamic validation messages, and session timeouts. Common failures include form fields without programmatic labels, error messages that are announced to screen readers with incorrect or missing ARIA roles, and timeout dialogs that do not give keyboard users enough time to respond. These are high-consequence failures because they block residents from completing transactions required to operate businesses or proceed with construction.

The COMET's web and mobile transit content. Transit content carries specific accessibility weight because riders with disabilities depend on it for trip planning. Common failures include route maps delivered as non-text image files, PDF schedules without tagged structure, and mobile applications that do not expose content to iOS VoiceOver or Android TalkBack. Real-time departure boards embedded via third-party widgets frequently inherit no accessible markup from the vendor.

GIS and mapping tools for property and zoning. Richland County and the City of Columbia both operate public-facing GIS viewers for property lookup, zoning, and parcel data. Interactive map tools are among the hardest components to make WCAG 2.1 AA conformant. Most vendor-supplied GIS viewers fail keyboard navigation entirely and offer no text alternative for the spatial data they present.

Compliance Timeline

Working backward from the April 26, 2027 deadline:

• Now through September 2026 — Complete an independent WCAG 2.1 AA audit. Without a baseline, remediation planning has no foundation.
• October 2026 through January 2027 — Execute remediation on critical and serious findings. Prioritize service-blocking failures in permitting, licensing, and transit content first.
• February through March 2027 — Conduct post-remediation validation testing. Fixes that resolve one failure sometimes introduce others.
• April 2027 — Publish a DOJ-compliant accessibility statement. The statement must reflect the current conformance status accurately.

Entities that have not started an audit by Q3 2026 will not have time to complete remediation and validation before the deadline.

South Carolina Guidance

For a broader overview of which South Carolina entities are covered and how, see the South Carolina government website accessibility guide.

The Parallax WCAG Audit

Morton Technology Consulting offers the Parallax WCAG audit at a fixed fee of $9,500.

The audit covers 200 representative pages across the agency's digital footprint. Testing combines automated scanning with axe-core against the full WCAG 2.1 Level AA ruleset and manual testing with NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS — the two most common screen readers used by government website visitors with disabilities. Keyboard-only navigation testing is conducted separately from screen reader testing to surface failures that automation cannot detect.

Deliverables include a full findings report with severity ratings (critical, serious, moderate, minor), a remediation roadmap prioritized by impact on service access, and a DOJ-compliant accessibility statement draft ready for legal review and publication.

At $9,500, the Parallax audit fits within most South Carolina government agency written-quote thresholds without a full competitive bid process.

Morton Technology Consulting serves government clients across the Southeast, including South Carolina entities operating under the April 2027 deadline. A sample audit report is available at morton-digital.com/parallax-sample-audit. Full service details are at morton-digital.com/products/parallax.

To start a conversation about your agency's timeline and scope, contact [email protected].

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*Morton Technology Consulting LLC, Tallahassee, FL. Southeast government website WCAG 2.1 compliance audits for the April 2027 deadline. [email protected]*

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